What have I gotten myself into? – On finding ‘1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up’

I work at an independent bookstore in South Australia, and while I was tidying the other day, I stumbled across a thick, red, hardback book called ‘1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up’. Now, I am 21 (22 next week), am studying for my masters and manage not to eat ice cream for breakfast (most of the time), but I am really just a little kid in a big person costume. Most of the books I read – and working at a bookstore, I am an avid reader – are children’s books. I love them. There is just something about a children’s book that clicks with me the way most books written for ‘grown ups’ don’t. I can suspend my disbelief so much more with a children’s book, wrap myself tight up in the story, dive right into it in a way that I just don’t get from ‘grown up’ books. It doesn’t matter what age the book is supposed to be for – I can be as absorbed by Enid Blyton’s ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ as I can by Philip Pullman’s Dark Material Trilogy. But where was I…

Oh yes, ‘1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up’. When I saw it, I immediately began flicking through it. There were old friends in there, books I had never heard of, and books that I wish I had read, but never got around to – like ‘The Wind in the Willows’. Yes, that’s right, children’s book enthusiast Georgi Paech has never read ‘Wind in the Willows’. Or ‘Anne of Green Gables’. Or ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, or ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, or ‘Tashi’, or ‘How I Live Now’… There were so many books that I have missed out on, that I was dying to read. And ones that I had never come across before, but that looked just dandy…

That’s where the idea for this journal came from. What if I actually did try to read as many of the books in ‘1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up’ as I could? At least then I could claim that I was doing something productive with all that time I was spending reading. So that is what I am going to do.

First stop: finally getting around to reading Kenneth Grahame’s ‘Wind in the Willows’.

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Tags: books, bookshops, children's books, Kenneth Grahame, kid's books, literature, Wind in the Willows